After getting a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and teaching for four years at Virginia Tech, I started in my current position at the UO in 1996. My research ranges from the Age of Goethe to contemporary literature. It addresses the relationship between identity formation and artistic creativity. I am interested in how writers attain a sense of who they are through the creation of literature.

The impetus for defining the self is most compelling at times of uncertainty. At the end of the eighteenth-century many writers attempted to give their individual lives purpose in a world that they felt had become devoid of transcendental meaning due to the erosion of religious belief systems. The literature of this time is highly self-reflective and provides insights into how writers compensated for the loss of meaning by creating an inner self. I have recently finished a book manuscript, entitled Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe that examines German middle-class intellectuals' search for a sense of self during that period.

How do my intellectual interests relate to my teaching? Why should students be fascinated by works that were written two hundred years ago and in language that is really hard to understand? How can I link the problems addressed in these texts to today's students' concerns? Only if students are stimulated to draw from their own experiences can they make original contributions and develop a genuine enthusiasm for the literature.

These considerations provoke the question why eighteenth century German literature is still pertinent. Eighteenth-century ideas about what it means to be human may be more relevant than ever in view of new advances in bio-technology. Central figures in German and European arts and letters strove to define what it means to be human in a physiological, intellectual, and ethical sense. The universal ideals they helped to establish, such as freedom, equality, moral justice, and compassion, still influence today's moral values. In my current research I explore whether humanist ethics might still have purchase in a postmodern world. I address the issue of whether these universal principles can still have a justification in a racially, culturally, ethnically, and socially diverse society with a pluralist mix of life-styles.